A box containing the banking details of 200 rich investors was found by the side of the road after apparently falling off the back of a courier's van.
The container, which included cheques and other sensitive papers, was supposed to be safely carried between a Prudential building in Reading to a secure storage facility in Essex …

Ok... where is Mr Beadle hiding?

Whipps Cross Hospital, he say...

"A helpline has been set up to address any concerns from Whipps Cross University Hospital patients - this will be open tomorrow from 10am to 3pm (Friday 11 November)."

On an item posted to their website on January 10th. If they don't know when "tomorrow" is, one can hardly expect them to keep track of confidential data, and I hope to $DEITY that I never require hospital treatment while at home

Ah good old British incompetence.

A while ago I had the misfortune to spend the night in a Travel Lodge. The cupboard in my room was filled to the top with boxes. In the boxes I found the last five years worth of credit card records. Including card numbers, signatures, addresses, business names etc.

It would certainly appear that, in the main, those responsible for keeping our valuable data safe have little or no idea what the hell they're doing.

The great UK data loss race is ON for 2008

In a sudden and unexpected turn of events, DHL have opened their account in the bid for this year's most significant data misplacement. A spokesperson for the company remarked upon this rather pleasing result explaining that their bid for supremacy was to be based not on the total number of records lost, or the total number of people inconvenienced (as saw last year's winning entry from none other than our Department of Social Services (is that "social security services", I forget - the names keep changing as they forget what they are called)) and instead have plumped for maximum resultant financial loss.

After spending 3 and a half hours trying to differentiate between left and right, the government finally found their way back from lunch and declared this to be a valid and impressive score, promising that they had every confidence that at least one of their many highly motivated departments would be able to supecede this in the months to come.

A Prudential employee who asked to remain nameless told us, "I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone lost information pertaining to people with enough money to make it worth their while for a third party to attempt stealing some."